Bill Cosby due in court with streamlined legal team

Bill Cosby has streamlined his legal team as the felony case against him heads to trial. (Mel Evans / AP)

Bill Cosby's defense team will have a new look when the actor returns to court for a hearing on Tuesday in his sexual assault case.

Cosby has streamlined his legal team as the felony case heads to trial and dropped his media handler, Washington lawyer Monique Pressley.

A judge in suburban Philadelphia could set a trial date.

The defense also will push on Tuesday to keep key evidence out of the case. They hope to suppress several days of testimony Cosby gave in the accuser's civil lawsuit a decade ago. Cosby acknowledged giving Andrea Constand several pills before what he calls a consensual sexual encounter. She later said she was in and out of consciousness.

"I don't hear her say anything. And I don't feel her say anything. And so I continue and I go into the area that is somewhere between permission and rejection. I am not stopped," Cosby testified in the 2005 lawsuit.

Veteran Philadelphia defense lawyer Brian McMonagle is expected to lead the courtroom fight as the case moves forward.

Cosby also replaced one top-tier Los Angeles law firm with another on his defense team, the second such switch in about a year. Angela Agrusa of Liner LLP also will handle the civil defamation suits filed in several states by accusers who say they were defamed when Cosby or his agents denied their accounts.

Cosby had countersued some of them.

But he has since abandoned that strategy in Philadelphia, where he dropped the lawsuit filed against Constand, her lawyers and her mother. Cosby had accused them of violating the confidentiality of their 2006 settlement, in part by cooperating with police last year.

The defense also hopes to suppress a secretly recorded 2005 phone call Cosby had with Gianna Constand, when he described his sexual encounter with her daughter.

District Attorney Kevin Steele will fight to use both the phone call and his deposition at trial.

Cosby has so far lost his efforts to have the charges thrown out.

And so the long-beloved comedian known as "America's Dad" for his top-rated show on family life that ran from 1984 to 1992 finds himself spending his time and fortune in his waning days in a Pennsylvania courtroom. The women who accuse him of similar misconduct say the charges were a long time coming.

Cosby's defenders instead suggest he is a wealthy target for the many women he met during five decades as an A-list celebrity.

"None of us will ever want to be in the position of attacking a victim. But the question should be asked — who is the victim?" his wife, Camille, asked as more accusers came forward in 2014.

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